Email Policy

Primary and Required Official Channel

Email is the College’s primary means of communication between students, faculty, and staff. Messages regarding course information, important deadlines, missing documents and official correspondence is sent to your Purchase email account.

All faculty, staff, and students are required to use Purchase College email system when conducting College business. The College expects that official email communications will be received and read in a timely fashion.

Do Not Forward

It is important that messages sent to your official Purchase email account are delivered to the intended recipient. It is important that official and sensitive College communications remain secure, and therefore Purchase College does not support automatic forwarding or redirection of email messages to external email accounts.

Storing Important and Sensitive materials

Important and sensitive materials should not be kept in your email account. With fragmented discussions and out‐of‐band replies, Email makes a terrible filing cabinet. If you send or receive important or sensitive materials via Email, save those materials in a secure location (Departmental file share or your Home Directory) and delete them from your Email.

Think of your Email account like the mailbox bolted to the front of your house – you would never think of storing anything sensitive or important there – it serves as a drop‐off location only, and you empty it regularly.

Email Retention

Per the Purchase College Email Retention Policy, Email messages are automatically purged at the end of our 3‐year retention period.

Legal Discovery

All College records are subject to legal discovery. If a particular email message has been flagged for legal hold preservation, those messages are automatically exempted from the 3‐rear retention purge.